Meanwhile, another US company called RSA Security—a unit of computer storage giant EMC—quietly told its customers to stop using a software encryption algorithm that it had long recommended. According to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA, which helped create the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (or Dual EC DRBG for short), had secretly introduced vulnerabilities into the algorithm so it could exploit them later.

Experts have long suspected that Dual EC DRBG, which generates a quasi-random string of numbers to be used in encryption, was intentionally flawed.

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